On Moses, Alfred Nobel, and the shocking grace of seeing yourself clearly
One morning in 1888, a well-known (and at the time quite infamous) Swedish chemist named Alfred Nobel opened a French newspaper and read his own obituary, whose headline read: “Le marchand de la mort est mort”—“The merchant of death is dead.”
Alfred Bernard Nobel was born to a large family in Stockholm, Sweden, and from a very young age, he excelled in school, exhibiting exceptional intelligence, as well as a particular interest in explosives. Growing into a chemist and engineer, he soon turned his childhood hobby into a lucrative career, inventing dynamite in early adulthood and soon building an empire by manufacturing and selling it all around the world. At his peak, Nobel owned over 100 dynamite factories. He supported not only the expansion of railroads and construction, but also—increasingly—war and violence, which spread exponentially due to the large-scale weapons he had invented.
By the time he died in 1888, he held over 300 patents and had amassed over $1 billion in today’s dollars.
The only problem with the obituary, of course, was that Nobel wasn’t dead. Or, more specifically, Alfred Nobel wasn’t dead. It was his brother, Ludvig Nobel, who died in 1888; the paper had made a mistake! As a result, not only was Alfred mourning his baby brother, but his own life, too. The newspaper had held up a mirror for Alfred to see himself—who he had become and all that harm he had done to this world. And he didn’t take this mirror image lightly.
Nobel spent his final eight years of life—he died in 1896—doing everything he could to turn around his legacy, to leave the world better than it was when he got there. Establishing the Nobel prizes in physics, chemistry, physiology or medicine, literature, economics, and peace, he used his tremendous wealth and influence to inspire countless thought leaders, inventors, and visionaries to change the world for generations to come. In just eight short years, Alfred Nobel changed course completely. He went from being remembered as the Merchant of Death to the Champion of Peace.
The seeds of that change were already in him; he just needed to see his own reflection clearly enough to find them.
I’ve been thinking about that rare gift, a clear look at your own life while there’s still time to change it, because our Jewish tradition tells a version of the same story. Only for us, the mirror is real, and the man holding it is Moses.
The Torah portion of Devarim begins with a bit of a mystery. On its surface, it seems straightforward:
“These are the words that Moses addressed to all Israel on the other side of the Jordan.”
We know what the words are, because they go on to fill the pages of the book of Deuteronomy. What we don’t know is why. Nobody prompts Moses to begin speaking, to go back and retell the story of the Exodus and the wilderness, let alone to give the Israelites a final charge for the promised land. Unlike other speeches from Moses, there is no “And God told Moses to gather the people and say unto them.” No one asks him a question that would merit such a response. In short, nobody asked for this sermon.
The rabbis, too, are stumped by this. But if you dig deep enough into their commentaries, you’ll find a clue all the way back in the book of Exodus.
When Moses first shared the instructions for building the Mishkan, the portable Tabernacle the Israelites carried through the desert, there was an exhaustive list of building materials. The list includes an item that at first seems almost inconsequential: mirrors.
“[Moses] made the copper washbasin with its copper stand from the copper mirrors among the ranks of women assigned to the meeting tent’s entrance.” (Exodus 38:8)
Nowhere else in the Torah do we read about the women gathering mirrors before leaving Egypt. Mirrors have no place in the story of wilderness wanderings. And yet, near the end of the journey, mirrors show up, and they appear to be a critically important element of the Tabernacle’s construction.
It was left to the rabbis of later generations to unpack this mystery. Perhaps, one midrash suggests, the Israelites’ liberation was first evident in their mirrored reflections. As time and distance separated them from enslavement, the image they saw reflected back by those polished copper vanities began to resemble an inner freedom. The Torah scholar Avivah Zornberg proposes a startling reading: What if their transformation, represented by the subtle changes in their faces staring back at them, is the promised land they were seeking all along? What if Moses’ first look into the mirror is actually his promised land?
Perhaps, the midrash suggests, these mirrors represent the first time since Moses’ childhood in Egypt that he can truly see himself. He is stunned by what forty years in the desert has done to his once-supple face. He sees the creases on his aging forehead, the toughness of his sun-baked cheeks, the frown lines of worrying about six hundred thousand stiff-necked Israelites, the crow’s feet from four decades of squinting over sand dunes into an uncertain horizon.
And perhaps, the midrash continues, just over his shoulder he catches a glimpse of the land behind him, too. The ground traversed over forty years of back-breaking hikes, up mountains and down mountains, across deserts and back again, and he witnesses how far he’s come. Not just how far he’s traveled, but how far he’s come.
For the first time, this mirror gives Moses a vision of the footprints he’s left behind him, traces of where he’s stumbled, reminders of what he’s learned. And maybe, as he assesses those stumbles and wayward steps, he decides to course correct one final time. To make his last days on this earth the most impactful. To finally become the person he had always wanted to be, and to empower the Israelites to do the very same thing.
What Moses comes to teach us, then, in his final and most powerful sermon, is that there is no use in looking backward if we don’t use it to drive us forward.
There is a word for this in Jewish tradition: teshuvah. It’s usually translated as “repentance,” but it more literally means “return.” And the work of enacting teshuvah begins on the heels of the darkest stretch of the Jewish calendar. Next week we’ll observe Tisha B’Av, the fast day that mourns the destruction of both ancient Temples in Jerusalem and, with them, a long history of Jewish loss. It opens a season that leads, over the weeks that follow, toward the introspection of the High Holy Days.
It doesn’t take a fast day to remind us that, today, we live in times of profound darkness, in which the suffering of our spirits can feel endless. But the question during days of mourning is this: How might a time of darkness serve to awaken the light deep inside of us?
The early twentieth-century mystic Rav Avraham Kook, in his book Orot HaTeshuvah, offered one of the most beautiful answers I know:
“The primary teshuvah, that which immediately brings lights into the darkness, is when a person returns to himself, to the deepest roots of his soul. Then he will immediately return to God, to the soul of all souls.” (Orot HaTeshuvah, 15:10)
Return to yourself first. To the places you’ve been and left, to the people you’ve loved and lost, to the seeds you once planted and since forgotten. That’s where the path forward gets illuminated.
Rabbi Adin Steinsaltz names the strangeness of it: “This is the paradox, the wonder of teshuvah. A person can change the course of his life not only prospectively, but retroactively, too.” If we stare into the mirror carefully enough, as Alfred Nobel and Moses before him once did, we’ll find the seeds of our own redemption somewhere in our past, waiting to be rediscovered.
For Moses, looking beyond his own face in the foreground of that copper mirror, he is reminded of his father-in-law Yitro, who once urged him to measure his legacy not by his own achievements but by those of the people he was struggling to lead. Perhaps it’s that memory that drives Moses to deliver his final charge. And perhaps it’s the reminder of his own mortality, the deepening wrinkles, the beard gone from jet black to white, that gives him the courage to hand the people the keys to their own destiny—to tell them once and for all that a bright future awaits them, not in the heavens, but in their hands to shape, in their mouths to speak, in their hearts to love.
“Today I set before you blessing and curse, life and death. Choose life, so that it may be well with you. Choose life, my dear ones. Choose life.” (Deuteronomy 30:19)
That’s what teshuvah is. It isn’t looking back for the sake of nostalgia, or dwelling on the past in ways that keep us from living in the present or dreaming for the future. Much as we might try to move on, the past keeps calling back to us, inviting us to harvest it rather than ignore it, to take the sustenance it offers for the road ahead. The Greek poet Dinos Christianopoulos captured it in a single couplet, imagining the buried past calling out to those who tried to be rid of it:
“What didn’t you do to bury me? But you forgot that I was a seed.”
So let your vision rest on two things at the same time: (1) on the meandering paths each of us has walked to arrive here, and (2) on the journey still ahead, a future waiting to be shaped by our truest selves, by the seeds already planted deep within us, and by the harvest that awaits us in time.
I’ll leave you with the words of the poet Gregory Orr:
Not to make loss beautiful,
but to make loss the place
where beauty starts.
Where the heart understands
for the first time
the nature of its journey.